EXAM 1: Lexical Development

Question 1

Classifications of words

Answer 1

Specific nominal (mom)
General nominal (cat)
Action words (go)
Modifiers (big)
Grammatical function words (is)
Personal Social words (no)
Prepositions/pronouns/articles

Question 2

Open class words

Answer 2

New words can be added

Question 3

Closed class words

Answer 3

New words not added, prepositions, pronouns, and articles

Question 4

Noun Bias

Answer 4

Nouns make up the largest single category of infant’s first 10-50 words

May be different in differing countries

Question 5

Conceptual Explanation of Noun Bias

Answer 5

Noun concepts are easier than verbs concepts
Nouns are more readily observable, but verbs are not (By the time you finish saying a verb, verb may already be finished) and doesn’t last

Basically, nouns are easier to learn and more readily available

Question 6

Linguistic Explanation for Noun Bias

Answer 6

Nouns can be learned through observation only, but verbs need additional linguistic contexts (syntactic bootstrapping)

Question 7

Syntactic Bootstrapping

Answer 7

Children draw on syntactic clues that the linguistic context provides in verb learning
Verb learning can be delayed because linguistic info is also not always readily available

Question 8

Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP)

Answer 8

Proved syntactic bootstrapping

Study:
older kids/adults used in experiment to simulate infant learning/development

Child watches video…
-LI (without linguistic context) and just target word BEEP (N/V)

+LI (with linguistic context) and target word BEEP (N/V)

Question: Could they identify the target N/V with or without linguistic information?

Results: Participants more likely to identify N with just observations. V identified with linguistic information

Question 9

Lexical Development

Answer 9

Developing mental lexicon
Vocab acquisition/word learning
Expressive vocab (Produce) and Receptive vocab (Understand); receptive vocab is more than expressive, gap widens

Question 10

Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPL)

Answer 10

Also proved syntactic bootstrapping

Study:
Children watched 2 scenes:
1. causative action of duck pushing rabbit
2. noncausative action of duck and rabbit waving
Children heard either:
1. Transitive verb “Duck is gorping the rabbit”
2. Nontransitive verb “Duck and rabbit are gorping”
Scenes were displayed on opposite sides

Question:
Which scene will children look at when they hear either transitive/nontransitive verb?

Result:
Children who heard transitive verb looked at causative scene, children who heard nontransitive verb looked at noncausative scene

Children integrated visual and sentence structural info to discover what verb was referring to

Question 11

Transitive verb

Answer 11

Causative verb, subject and object

Question 12

Nontransitive verb

Answer 12

Noncausative verb, no object

Question 13

Ditransitive verb

Answer 13

Dative

Question 14

Segmentation problem

Answer 14

Segmenting individual words from continuous stream of speech
uses statistical analysis with syllables to find words in speech stream

Question 15

Mapping problem

Answer 15

What is the word referring to? referential ambiguity

Question 16

Fast mapping

Answer 16

Immediately done after hearing

Question 17

Mutual Exclusivity (Fast Mapping)

Answer 17

Assign the new word to new referrent, one object must only have one word to it

must overcome in order to learn different categories

Question 18

Basic category words

Answer 18

Colloquial, common, learned first

Question 19

Subordinate category words

Answer 19

Specific

Question 20

Superordinate category words

Answer 20

Broadest

Question 21

Joint Attention (Fast Mapping)

Answer 21

Babies are sensitive to sical cues, when adult and infant are joint attention, more mapping
sensitive to direction, gaze, all important in referrent identification
cannot be used alone since child may still point to wrong referrent

Question 22

Linguistics (Fast Mapping)

Answer 22

Syntactic bootstrapping with verbs

Question 23

Cross-situational mapping

Answer 23

Mapping done over multiple occasions
must remember previous occasions the object was mentioned and keep track of it

Question 24

Whole-object Bias

Answer 24

One way infant may use to map
Word labels the whole object

Question 25

Shape Bias

Answer 25

One way infant may use to map
word generalizes to same shaped objects

Question 26

Taxonomic bias

Answer 26

One way infant may use to map
learn new words by grouping objects into categories based on shared characteristics
i.e. dax with a dog picture was more likely to be categorized with another dog than a thematic relation

Question 27

Syntactic labeling problem

Answer 27

Is it transitive? Nontransitive?
Don’t know its grammatical structure/function

Question 28

Individual differences in lexical development

Answer 28

Words used by children (by 3 y.o) were derived from parent’s vocab (the type of words lexical diversity and average words input)

Question 29

Hart and Risley’s 1995 study

Answer 29

Took sample of 44 children
Showed that all were developing vocab regardless of SES, but the 3 groups (high SES, mid SES, low SES) all differed in vocab size

Showed disparity in vocab growth amongst children of different SES

higher SES = higher vocab

Matthew Effect
As they grew older, their differences increased

Correlated with parents vocab/speaking data
The primary care giver’s cumulative words addressed to child/input had exactly same pattern as the child’s vocab size

DRAWBACK: Only focused on primary caregiver input, no secondary or environment input
Still influential study

Question 30

30 million word gap

Answer 30

Children from lower SES heard 30 million less words than higher SES kids

Question 31

2018 study debunking H&R (1995)

Answer 31

Considered all speech from environment, used 42 sample size
Less SES heard more speech

Question 32

2016 study of gender, daycare, and bilingualism

Answer 32

Study: Observed 51 children and their vocab sizes for german
only looked at expressive vocab
Similar SES
high quality daycare program

Questions:
Would girl v. boy vocab differ?
Would no daycare v. daycare differ?

Results:
All children developed German typically
No gender differences in vocab size, but different in vocab composition
No GENERAL differences between vocab size and comp between care groups

Girls without daycare before 2 years had more vocab than all subgroups

Children who had daycare generally positive correlation with vocab size

Teacher talking matters

Bilingual children had less vocab than monolingual children when looking at a single language

Question 33

Vocab and Intellect

Answer 33

Pace of vocab growth related to cortical growth
Children with higher vocab better at reading
Reading related to academic achievements
Gesture usage predicative of vocab development